52 Weeks, 52 Words: Week 45 - Acceptance
Yesterday was my birthday, and I am now squarely in my mid-40s. It’s a bit sobering and I get a bit sheepish at the thought of celebrating. As a kid, birthdays were something to look forward to and the anticipation was as much of the excitement as the party, cake, and presents. My daughter shares in that same enthusiasm and has now even co-opted a seemingly random day in the middle of October as her half-birthday and anticipates that day with nearly as much glee as the spring day when we celebrate her birth. But now, for me it’s just an acceptance of another trip around the Sun and a long slow march through adulthood. I have even a bit of weariness with each passing birthday and a reluctance to put in much fanfare.
So, too, at times can we lose that perspective and giddiness within the course of a year or even a career. Fresh perspectives are good and challenge us to rekindle the excitement and energy we once had for our chosen profession in medical communications.
While it may feel like just another symposium or just another scientific platform, if we accept the assignment for our client and treat it with a milquetoast indifference, then what we will produce will also reek of blandness and sameness.No, we must reject that timidity and approach each new assignment with the same fascination and purpose as we did our very first.
More than that, we must push past our own blasé attitudes when they creep in and summon the capacity to find something new or enrich the aged with a new-found fervor.
That’s often the crucial ingredient in our brainstorms and pitch planning. While there is, undoubtedly, value and a critical need for experience to anchor our thinking, we must accept new ideas unfounded in experience.
Ideas can come from anywhere…in fact they should come from everywhere. The broader a perspective we let in the more likely an idea of true innovation and novelty can emerge. Forcing ourselves to slow down and forge ahead including those without experience, we can invite invigorated thinking. Accepting ideas from our team members that don’t know the first thing about a disease state or about a category of stakeholders offers a chance to reject deeply held biases and ponder a different way or a different end product.
Out of that experience, unshackled from pessimism an unbounded optimism can emerge to push us out of the sea of sameness.
Too often, though, we limit the size of our brainstorming team or we force fit the brainstorming process to an unobjective method whereas ideas come forward they are met with critique and evaluated on spec even before they have hardly had a moment to be considered. Even if only one new idea emerges from within that exercise it is still one more idea than we had before. And, more importantly, it has awoken a sensibility in our colleagues – particularly those not yet calloused by the boorish nature and sometimes tedium of our profession – that anything is possible, and all ideas can be celebrated. That will have far greater impact than the one idea and reverberate across many more brainstorms.
It’s the crucible of bold ideation that we must accept if we are to thrive!
For as much as I want to sometimes slip out of celebrating my birthday and tamping down the exuberance, my kids derive great joy in making homemade cards, helping to unwrap the gifts that they purchased, and the fascination of discovering what’s inside (even though they know what the bought).
While it may be my 44th birthday and I have grown weary or uninterested, for them, it’s only the 6th and 4th time they’ve ever celebrated it with me, and their experience is not marred by the scars of time or a weariness of repitition. With their innocence and joy I must locate my own boyish delight and revel in the experience of my birthdays again. It only takes a tiny spark to light a fire and our acceptance of the needs and wants of those around us will only multiply that ember’s power.
Here’s to the start of my 45th year and my willingness to transform a jaded outlook into something magical!
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